Notes from the on-call rotation.

Written by the people who build Artisan, mostly about the arithmetic of failure: what a bug costs, what to page a human for, and what to keep when you cannot keep everything.

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Running the numbers Sep 12, 2026 7 min read

What an unhandled exception costs after it leaves your log

Most teams can name their uptime and nobody can name this. Here is the arithmetic we walk through in week one, with a checkout timeout as the worked example.

Dana Reyes

Engineer at Artisan

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Aug 27, 2026 Under the hood Fingerprints, or why your alert storm is one bug How Artisan decides two exceptions are the same exception, what it deliberately ignores, and the three cases where you should override it yourself. 6 min read Aug 11, 2026 On-call Alert rules that let people sleep Four rules we have seen work on teams between five and two hundred engineers, and the two that sound responsible and are not. 5 min read Jul 28, 2026 Under the hood Sampling traces without lying to yourself Head sampling is cheap and throws away the interesting requests. Here is what we sample at, what we never sample, and how to read a p95 that came out of a sample. 8 min read

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